Customer Reviews

The Black Heralds (Lannan Literary Selections) (Spanish Edition)

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I have not read Ms. Seiferle's translation of Los Heraldos Negros (so please ignore the rating) but I have read her translation of Trilce: this is much better than either of the others I have by David Smith and Clayton Eshelman, which would lead one to reasonably believe that her version of Vallejo's first work would exhibit most if not all of the same qualities: a receptive tenderness toward Poetic as opposed to Literal meanings, and, a rhythmic intuitiveness neccessary to good translation; something Mr. Eshelman is sadly lacking in his own work on this great Poet (Smith hardly bears up to any scrutiny at all, being non-poet, although well intentioned). But I did want to clarify two things for the uninitiated about Vallejo himself and this work: 1) Los Heraldos Negros did have another English Language publication, contrary to what the book review above is telling you: in 1990, by Latin American Literary Review Press (Richard Schaaf & Kathleen Ross were the translators). 2) Vallejo's Marxist beliefs are nowhere to be found in his poetry. This is the sort of thinking one associates with people who are only marginally aware of what Vallejo is trying to say and who thus confuse it with his later activities while in France (Los Heraldos Negros was composed Before the move, not after). The best advice here is to ignore Vallejo's public pronouncements at all times and concentrate instead upon his Poems; these will tell you what he actually thinking as well as why. You will also avoid the embarassment of linking it to any sort of politics or theory. Suffering is Vallejo's political affiliation, his literary theory, not the Marxism he was later drawn to because he could not bear to live in a world completely devoid of all practical hope. We should always bear this in mind when we recall his poetry: that he could not live without love (hope) and so chose to devote himself to Marxism because it seemed to him (then) as the best hope for a just future. That it was not only deepens the sweet/sad content (trilce) of his indisputably great poetry.

Sensitive translation, very likable and subtle. The English line sounds and flows along the original like a sweet melody. It reads
more beautifully than the epic Eshelman's gritty version. The meaning of a poem by Vallejo is most times hard to get first. But his
lines are the core of feelings in Spanish poetry and Ms. Rebbeca Seiferle's version a treasure from it. With an Introduction and "Notes and Original Versions"
pages at the end of the book.

Readers who first encounter the militant, intellectual Vallejo stumble, as must have the first patrons of Picasso's *Guernica*, into a territory where radical politics and language consciousness cannot be divided. Famous for his revulsion at the capitalist conscious (or lack of one), Vallejo's poetry--from its most profane to its most threateningly lyrical--is an hardline education in the Marxist point of view. Middle class comfort, with its notion of safety, self-destructs on contact with Vallejo's "auroral dagger"; even in translation his verse splices the "burning coals" of the lip with the deliberate confusion of syntax and the extremities of diction.

When Vallejo proclaims "my lip/will split open into a hundred sacred petals./Tilda will hold the dagger/the flower-killing and auroral dagger!" ("Burning Coals") he places the speaker under intellectual and emotional arrest. Often with Vallejo there is no where to go but into the terrible dwellings of all experience and a life that struggles toward the new--fusing politics and romance, invention and lyric. The reader, very likely the middle class reader or writer under accusation, is faced with the impossible: syntax lures the reader into suffering. Diction becomes "a pariah's neurasthenic song," a verse of the nerve ("Leaves of Ebony"). The reader is placed on the rack of what Vallejo himself calls a "multisense of sweet unbeing" ("For the Impossible Soul of My Beloved") .

For the reader interested in poetry that works the ideals of politic and word into dangerously parabolic axes, the place to start is *The Black Heralds*. For the Marxist Vallejo with something to teach us now, the heart's language and the mind's dialectic arc into the Peruvian's "sublime parabola of love." ("For the Impossible Soul...") Perhaps Peru's greatest Modernist has something to teach us yet about the true springs of Idealism.